I train people in a theater in the oldest Brazilian psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro; and in Montreal, Canada, with significant improvement in range of conditions. Between 2012 to 2016 we successfully occupied abandoned wards in the Pedro II Psychiatric Center in Engenho de Dentro, Rio de Janeiro, as the Madness Hotel that became the headquarters for the People’s University for Art and Science. Unfortunately, the Hotel was closed in May 2016 (with the Coup d’état in Brazil). We keep working with the community of Engenho de Dentro rehearsing regularly in the public square beside the hospital.
Public health, public policy, community medicine, community psychiatry, culture and health, health promotion, mental health, mental health promotion, treatment of psychosis, popular education, theatre, culture and health, art and science; aesthetics
Management, strategic planning, medical semiology, psychiatric semiology, teaching, pedagogy, performing arts, theater, performance, public performance, improvisation, play, actor training, method of acting, Shakespeare, Brecht, Goethe
Transcultural psychiatry, psychopathology, basic and clinical immunology, immunological physiology, immunopathology, mental health management, clinical and basic research, community health education, community approaches, biology of cognition
Pordeus V. Can Biology Help Us to Understand Psychopathology? EC Psychology and Psychiatry. 2:3 (2017) https://www.ecronicon.com/ecpp/pdf/ECPP-02-000052.pdf
This is my latest paper where I have tried to synthesize the last 12 years of research framing a concept of contemporary biology that accordingly helps us to advance psychiatry, psychotherapy and mental health promotion, the main authors debated are the neurobiologists Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela and Jorge Mpodozis and in psychiatry, psychic healing clinical experiences like those of Carl Jung, the north American John Weir Perry and the Brazilian woman psychiatrist Nise da Silveira, many contemporary examples are given in the paper.
https://upac.academia.edu/VitorPordeus
This website contains almost everything I have published from papers, visual essays, documentary movies, it is all there in this collaborative research website academia.edu
This is the main website for the People’s University of Art and Science where you can look at its works, experiences, publications and an online soap-opera performed and broadcast by the Madness Hotel and DyoNises Theatre in Rio de Janeiro, most of it is in Portuguese, however, there’s quite a lot of text and movies with subtitles in English.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-32241100
Landmark reportage by the BBC documenting our work in the motion of the historic 2014/2015 “Hamlet: madness yet there’s method in it” production
https://aeon.co/essays/can-performing-shakespeare-help-to-cure-mental-illness
Landmark essay written by the Rio de Janeiro based English writer and journalist Beth McLoughlin it is very well written - she accompanied our group for several months and covered every subject extensively
https://soundcloud.com/vitor-pordeus/shakespeare-brazilian-dramatherapy-on-bbc-radio-health-news
This is a beautiful radio piece with conversation between British drama therapy Professors commenting on our Brazilian experience with Shakespeare and Psychiatry
Podcast
A quite free interview with the radio artist and activist Sylvia Richardson, we met in a performance and politics meeting in the Texas University at Austin 2015.
An exciting YouTube about our work over the last two years in clinical drama through the Theatre Company ‘Dyonises’